Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) is a format used to store document data for print jobs, archival and other forms of presentation such as viewing. According to AFP standards, a print job is divided into AFP objects. Each AFP object may define a part of the print job, such as a document, a page, an image, text, etc. Further, AFP objects may be nested within each other. For example, an AFP document object may include multiple AFP page objects, and each AFP page object may include multiple text and/or graphical objects.
Each AFP print job may be associated with metadata. Metadata is contextual information used to describe the print job. For example, metadata may indicate an author of the print job, may indicate a preferred rasterization algorithm to use while processing the print job, or may indicate any other suitable characteristic of the print job. As presently required according to AFP standards, metadata for an AFP print job is stored within an index as a series of one or more AFP-defined Index Elements (IELs). Each IEL includes Tagged Logical Elements (TLEs), which each contain a single name-value attribute pair. A more robust form would include metadata represented in XML format or metadata objects which, themselves, may contain alternate representations for the object such as annotation, audio, video, java script and the like. Association of such rich metadata has recently been enabled for the AFP Print File (MOCA-1) as well as at the AFP Object level (MOCA-2).
However, a problem with the above-described method is that in order to associate metadata with individual components (e.g., a word or text phrase) within a page, the page must be separated into multiple text objects. This results in fragmentation of an otherwise well-composed page. This fragmentation can lead to workflow challenges when merging or modifying content and performance issues in the final rendering (e.g. printing).
Accordingly, an efficient metadata tagging mechanism which does not disrupt the intended document taxonomy is desired.